See, this is the stuff I want to avoid... It makes me want to pull my hair out... "Clunky" and "NOT bootable" are unacceptable to me... This is why I would want to take each computer to Central, and give the headache of cloning to them! Or, if Woohoo can help me clone the desktop drives, as he's offered, I'd accept that help... Worst case, is that Woohoo doesn't want to do the cloning; so, I take the drives that he wants to give me for the two Desktops, (Farragut and Prometheus), and take them to Central and pay them to clone the two systems.

My goal is to have Win 7 untouched by Win 10 on their original drives per system, stored in case Win 10 becomes a MAJOR debacle... Which realistically I DON'T anticipate happening... I would hope that once cloned, that Win 10 will just pickup and Upgrade Win 7 on the cloned drives without incident.

Okay, well, here's an idea then. You said Win7, right? Then it has built-in backup & restore, and you can make an entire system image and save it to another drive letter. I know for sure (because I've done it) that the image that is made can be mounted in disk management (winkey+R > diskmgmt.msc) as a read-only virtual drive. That's about as close as you're going to get to the image itself being "bootable."

However, imaging software generally always copies the master boot sector, as well as the boot sector of the partition(s), so when you restore the image back to another HDD (or the same one later), the boot sectors are restored, as well, making that HDD bootable.

So what if the interface for clonezilla is "a little clunky"? It's free, isn't it? Me, personally, I'd just deal with "a little clunky" if it meant not spending money. But that's just me. *shrug*

If Clonezilla is "clunky", there's always the free non-commercial version of Macrium Reflect. I've used it for a few years, I take a full system image every night, just in case. Currently using it on a laptop to switch between 7 & 10.

P.

---

If I want to give Win 10 a spin now, can I put it into VirtualBox as a VM Machine??? Will I need a Key to Activate it, or can I just run it straight??? If I need a Key, I assume it needs to be paid for, right???

I have VirtualBox running on my Win 7 Home Premium Laptop, (Voyager), along with five VMs. (XP Pro x64, a clone/copy of XP Pro x64, Ubuntu 14.04 Unity, Ubuntu 14.04 GNOME - Trusty Tahr Version, and Win 2000.) I would like to get familiar with the installation process of Win 10 Pro x64. I have the .iso disk that I created recently, so I could use it to make a new VM out of... Voyager is an HP Pavilion DV9000 Laptop with AMD Turion X2 Dual Core Processor, and an OLD NVIDIA GeForce card. I'm NOT going to run BOINC on it. (Already did that, and wasn't happy with the heat dissipation; Voyager got extremely warm, almost hot to the touch in the upper left corner of the system. This was even with an external cooling device with two fans running.) Voyager has 4 GB RAM, (2 GB reserved for VM, and one core reserved for VM), and VM access to the hard drive, DVD Drive, and USB Ports. VirtualBox is up to date.


TL

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TimeLord04
Have TARDIS, will travel...
Come along K-9!
Join Calm Chaos

I have already adjusted the settings on my system, to my liking.

The thing is, you shouldn't have to adjust anything if you put your privacy first. Why does a setting like this have to be on by default, and do you have to search through multiple tens of menus to turn it off?

What is the use of anyone in your address book being able to get onto your Wifi when they are in the neighborhood of your house? Remember, they don't even need to be in your house here to use this function, they could do it from their car parked in the street. Do you know everyone in your address book? Do you know everyone in their address books? It doesn't matter that the password isn't visible, the connecting occurs automatic, and any slightly bad person on either list can then park a van in front of your house and tap your wifi without you knowing it.

From your own FAQ link:

Automatically connect you to open Wi‑Fi networks it knows about by crowdsourcing networks that other people using Windows have connected to.

And further along:

What determines if Wi‑Fi Sense will automatically connect to open Wi‑Fi hotspots?
Wi‑Fi Sense will automatically connect you to suggested open Wi‑Fi hotspots if you have Connect to suggested open hotspots turned on in Settings > Network & Internet > Wi‑Fi > Manage Wi‑Fi settings. This is turned on already if you did either of these:

* Selected Use Express settings when you first set up your PC with Windows 10.

Know how many people use the Express install?
Know how many people do not read what the blurb says and just click OK?
Know how many people do not really know how their computer works or what it all does?
They should all give up their privacy just because Microsoft says so?

It's all right to be a Windows 10 fanboy, but do give others the right to advocate against it, without burning them and their posts down at every opportunity you have.

You would have me believe you don't use iOS, Google or Android in any way? If that is the case, you may have an argument. Otherwise, your point is moot. This is the state of the art, get used to protecting yourself. The publishers have no interest in doing so....

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I have already adjusted the settings on my system, to my liking.

The thing is, you shouldn't have to adjust anything if you put your privacy first. Why does a setting like this have to be on by default, and do you have to search through multiple tens of menus to turn it off?

What is the use of anyone in your address book being able to get onto your Wifi when they are in the neighborhood of your house? Remember, they don't even need to be in your house here to use this function, they could do it from their car parked in the street. Do you know everyone in your address book? Do you know everyone in their address books? It doesn't matter that the password isn't visible, the connecting occurs automatic, and any slightly bad person on either list can then park a van in front of your house and tap your wifi without you knowing it.

From your own FAQ link:

Automatically connect you to open Wi‑Fi networks it knows about by crowdsourcing networks that other people using Windows have connected to.

And further along:

What determines if Wi‑Fi Sense will automatically connect to open Wi‑Fi hotspots?
Wi‑Fi Sense will automatically connect you to suggested open Wi‑Fi hotspots if you have Connect to suggested open hotspots turned on in Settings > Network & Internet > Wi‑Fi > Manage Wi‑Fi settings. This is turned on already if you did either of these:

* Selected Use Express settings when you first set up your PC with Windows 10.

Know how many people use the Express install?
Know how many people do not read what the blurb says and just click OK?
Know how many people do not really know how their computer works or what it all does?
They should all give up their privacy just because Microsoft says so?

It's all right to be a Windows 10 fanboy, but do give others the right to advocate against it, without burning them and their posts down at every opportunity you have.

You would have me believe you don't use iOS, Google or Android in any way? If that is the case, you may have an argument. Otherwise, your point is moot. This is the state of the art, get used to protecting yourself. The publishers have no interest in doing so....

i know many ppl that still use the old flip phones because they can t work out how to use smartphones

as for the wifi crowdsourcing that is complete crap it makes wifi passwords on your network useless

i turned all that crap off on win 10

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I came down with a bad case of i don't give a crap

i know many ppl that still use the old flip phones because they can t work out how to use smartphones

Hey now.. I use a flip phone just because I don't need a smartphone. I don't use social networking, so why should I get some expensive phone just to occasionally text and do phone calls? I like the fact that I only charge my phone every 3-7 days. And if I lose it or break it.. I can get another off of ebay for $7 including shipping.

Nobody needs a smartphone, they just think they do because everyone else has one and they don't want to be the odd man out.


Back onto the win10 topic.. a friend of mine used the tech preview on his laptop for two months and it was great for him. Everything worked. But now that it has been officially released.. hardly anything works. A lot of the games don't play because the display driver crashes (R290x, using the latest drivers from AMD), Hamachi and OpenVPN don't work, and a number of other problems. He's spending hours and hours trying to figure out exactly why some games work and others don't, and I keep telling him "these are release day problems. I told you two months ago this would happen. Wait a few weeks or a month or two for software developers to find and fix problems." Did he listen? No. He wants win10 for the same reason most people want smartphones.. because it is the latest thing and is all the rage.

For example, the devs for LogMeIn said back in April when someone was having problems getting the tunnel driver to work in build 10240.. "We have every intention of supporting 10...when it comes out. We are not going to waste our time and resources developing software that works with a beta OS, just to have something change and make all of our hard work non-functional and have to start over again. So when 10 is officially released and finalized, then we will begin development since we know the backend of the OS won't change unexpectedly."

I would have to imagine a lot of games are going to be like that, too. One would think that everything should work just fine, but that's not entirely the case. Some older games work just fine, because they only use DirectX 9. But the problem seems to be with ones that use 10/11, they don't particularly cooperate very well. This is a software thing, probably half on the video card drivers, and half on the game may need a small update patch. Or maybe thirds, with the final third being on MS to get DirectX sorted-out a bit better.

Meanwhile.. my win7 is still working juuuust fine. No problems, no issues, everything works. I remember when I was still on XP and 7 came out, there were compatibility issues with things and it took a while to sort it all out, and now look at it.. it's kind of the gold standard baseline to compare everything to. I think 10 will get there eventually.. it's just got some of those growing pains to go through first.

All in all.. despite how the saying goes, the latest is not always the greatest. I'm looking forward to 10, but I'm still holding onto my original plan of waiting 3-6 months before doing so.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Nobody needs a smartphone, they just think they do because everyone else has one and they don't want to be the odd man out.

I do need a smart phone since it got my provisioning tools on it to provision CPE's in the field :) plus wifi tether is a good thing to have

I don't use social media like facebook and whatnot either and i rarely send text's but it s handy to look something up on google sometimes

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I came down with a bad case of i don't give a crap

You would have me believe you don't use iOS, Google or Android in any way? If that is the case, you may have an argument. Otherwise, your point is moot. This is the state of the art, get used to protecting yourself. The publishers have no interest in doing so....

As I said in this very thread:

Luckily Google owns all my emails (Gmail account), all my private communications (Android telephone) and I have neigh on nothing in private folders, so nothing to worry here. :)

Which of my points was moot, though? You quoted everything, so you ought to have read and understood everything. Have you?

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good thing is, looks like blackviper already updated his site with win10 info, which would make all the MS data mining and other OS pretend niceness pretty much obsolete, if you just disable the unwanted stuff.

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

I'd already made up my mind to stick with 7 Pro and I'm not seeing anything yet that persuades me away from that, even slightly.

Windows 7 doesn't fully support DirectX 12. If you're into games, you eventually do want full DX12 support, from both the OS and your hardware. Just see Square Enix's DX12 demo.

But luckily enough the games that use this tech aren't out yet, so there's no need to rush onto Win10 for now.

---

You would have me believe you don't use iOS, Google or Android in any way? If that is the case, you may have an argument. Otherwise, your point is moot. This is the state of the art, get used to protecting yourself. The publishers have no interest in doing so....

As I said in this very thread:

Luckily Google owns all my emails (Gmail account), all my private communications (Android telephone) and I have neigh on nothing in private folders, so nothing to worry here. :)

Which of my points was moot, though? You quoted everything, so you ought to have read and understood everything. Have you?

No, actually you are correct, I did not notice your post. But then you understand, I hope. I have installed Windows 10 and the latest CCC, 15.20-150715a-184226E, without any trouble, whatsoever. That is my point though. Why is there so much screaming and gnashing of teeth over a simple OS upgrade. Especially one that was long overdue (like the jump from XP to 7). Anyhow, nothing personal. I happen to enjoy the new interface presented by Windows 10 and will continue to use it.

Peace and good luck crunching.

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Why is there so much screaming and gnashing of teeth over a simple OS upgrade.

People hate change. We've seen it with nearly every MS OS release for the past 30 years. We will continue to see it for the rest of our lives.

Why is there so much screaming and gnashing of teeth over a simple OS upgrade.

People hate change. We've seen it with nearly every MS OS release for the past 30 years. We will continue to see it for the rest of our lives.

Quite true...

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Why is there so much screaming and gnashing of teeth over a simple OS upgrade.

People hate change. We've seen it with nearly every MS OS release for the past 30 years. We will continue to see it for the rest of our lives.

Greetings Ozz,

There is nothing wrong with change, as long as it is change for the good. Windoze 10 does not seem to fit that 'good' change category, not when data collection and whatnot is 'turned on' by default. 90% of users, I would estimate, just do the 'Recommended/Express' install. I learned a very long time ago not to go that route.

And who's gonna read the whole EULA? I never do; it takes too long. Besides, it's written by lawyers anyway and in such a way that one needs to be a lawyer to understand what they say, for the most part and in my opinion.

No, I will wait for the smoke to clear before I start thinking seriously about upgrading. I think I'll get a couple of flash drives and download that sucker for the future if I do decide to do it. ;)

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

Why is there so much screaming and gnashing of teeth over a simple OS upgrade.

People hate change. We've seen it with nearly every MS OS release for the past 30 years. We will continue to see it for the rest of our lives.

There is nothing wrong with change, as long as it is change for the good. Windoze 10 does not seem to fit that 'good' change category, not when data collection and whatnot is 'turned on' by default. 90% of users, I would estimate, just do the 'Recommended/Express' install. I learned a very long time ago not to go that route.

True, but 'good' is in the eye of the beholder. There were a subset of users that thought Windows 95 wasn't 'good'. There were a subset of users that thought XP wasn't 'good'. Those OSes largely stayed the same over time. The only thing that changed was people's perception once they got used to the change.

Mind you, I am not dismissing the privacy concerns. But I do think they are blown out of proportion and partly unfounded. Attempts have been made here in this thread and elsewhere on the internet to circumvent the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the scary wording. Still, people will seize upon specific portions of the EULA, take it out of context, and turn it into something that it is not.

And who's gonna read the whole EULA? I never do; it takes too long. Besides, it's written by lawyers anyway and in such a way that one needs to be a lawyer to understand what they say, for the most part and in my opinion.

Agreed, I do not have the inclination to read the entire EULA, nor do I have a law degree to understand the verbiage used. However, that's what makes it all the more important to not take the words out of context. I know a lot of internet arm-chair wannabe lawyers (I am not referring to anyone on this site specifically) that do the same to actual government law as well. It's a dangerous precedent to get involved in if you simply don't know.

An argument could be made that EULAs need to be easier to understand and read, but I think we could expect to find flying Unicorns before that happens.

No, I will wait for the smoke to clear before I start thinking seriously about upgrading. I think I'll get a couple of flash drives and download that sucker for the future if I do decide to do it. ;)

Understood. Nothing wrong with taking that approach at all. But do understand that history has seen this repeated so many times with MS OSes, and they have all been largely molehills made into mountains that subsided over time.

Change is good . The problem is Microsoft mangeling it
Nobody wants these damn tiles anywhere plus i really don't want this xbox crap and the apps that cannot be uninstalled.
I want to have control what's on my machine and that is why i run linux on the machines i work with , i couldn't care less about the crunchers ... nothing to see there really

---

I came down with a bad case of i don't give a crap

Microsoft has always had a dominant vision of an OS for "everybody". This means catering to the lowest common demoninator and making things as stupid easy as they possibly can. This should directly read the opposite of customizing like most geeks like to do.

It's a tough act to try to make an OS to fit everyone, from the grandmas that only know clicking on the E means she can visit her friends on the Book of Faces or playing her games on Pogo.com to the tech who wants to remove anything they consider to be unnecessary in the OS - all the while trying to move computing along into the future and playing catch-up with features found in Mac OS X and borrowing ideas from Linux too.

As for all the apps and tiles.. Microsoft is trying to unify all platforms so that in the future, it won't matter if you're on their gaming system, their phone OS, or a tablet, you will have the same experience on all. It's not a bad vision, but that does mean things will change, and need to change. That means people will complain and say things like "My desktop is not an XBox or a tablet!". Fair enough. But to unify the experience, it needs to happen.

But yes, Microsoft does mangle it from time to time. Windows 8 was their first attempt at doing so, and the OS felt very disjointed and like it suffered from MPD. Windows 10 is far better at it, and with the ongoing updates, the experience across all platforms will become more and more unified as time goes on.

Change is good . The problem is Microsoft mangeling it
Nobody wants these damn tiles anywhere plus i really don't want this xbox crap and the apps that cannot be uninstalled.
I want to have control what's on my machine and that is why i run linux on the machines i work with , i couldn't care less about the crunchers ... nothing to see there really

Greetings Zombu2,

Hear, hear! I agree 100%. I would like a way to remove tiles and/or replace them with a verbal equivalent. I cannot read pictures, but I sure as hell can read words. Pictures take up too much real estate. I do not own, and never will own, an Xbox. I want that 'option' removed too. And yes, I don't want crap on my PC that I don't use and cannot remove. I'm sure someone will figure out a way to remove unwanted, irremovable apps. :)

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

And....it's back. The 353.62 driver got reinstalled last evening, despite the updates having been "hidden" by that troubleshooter hack. As I described in my Message 1707385 on Saturday morning, the troubleshooter seemed to work, hiding the driver updates and preventing them from applying over several reboots, both soft restarts and one complete shutdown and reboot. However, there was that one nagging artifact left on the Windows Updates screen showing an update for the 660 still sitting there, even though the troubleshooter didn't show it.

Over the remainder of the weekend, I went through perhaps 15-20 reboots, tinkering with different things in my attempts to figure out the problem with only 2 of 8 cores working. The driver remained unchanged through all that and nothing new was downloaded by Windows Update overnight Saturday.

Then, shortly after 8:00 PM yesterday, while I was on that machine checking something else out, the screen display starting jumping and cutting in and out. It did that for about a minute, then settled. About 2 hours later, I decided to shut the machine down for the night, and ended up having to wait about 5 minutes for the shutdown to complete. I suspect it was applying the driver update, although with Windows 10, the screen just goes black without providing any of those "Stage 1 of 3", etc., updating messages, so I have no idea what was really going on. This morning there it was, the 353.62 driver for all 4 GPUs. Checking the Windows Update history, it shows a single driver update for a GTX 660 on August 2, yesterday.

So, that's it. I think I've learned enough about Win 10 to know that it's not an OS that's ready for prime time...yet. It's certainly not something I'd want on my daily driver, which was the reason I was using the xw9400 as a guinea pig in the first place. I expect that sometime later on today, when I can get to it, I'll try rolling back to Win 7, assuming that Win 10's rollback process actually works. If it doesn't, I've got an image copy of that machine on Win XP from 2 weeks ago that I should be able to revert to.

And then I think I'll hunker down with the large crowd of folks that have decided to wait for several months to see how responsive MS is in getting Win 10's issues "fixed".

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the "show or hide" troubleshooter still shows the driver update for the 660 as hidden. However, the one for the 750Ti has disappeared from the "hidden" screen. Go figure!

-[ snip ]-

As for all the apps and tiles.. Microsoft is trying to unify all platforms so that in the future, it won't matter if you're on their gaming system, their phone OS, or a tablet, you will have the same experience on all. It's not a bad vision, but that does mean things will change, and need to change. That means people will complain and say things like "My desktop is not an XBox or a tablet!". Fair enough. But to unify the experience, it needs to happen.

-[ snip ]-

Greetings Ozz,

My cell and tablet are Android driven. Luckily, Micro$oft cannot touch them. :)

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

Change is good . The problem is Microsoft mangeling it
Nobody wants these damn tiles anywhere plus i really don't want this xbox crap and the apps that cannot be uninstalled.
I want to have control what's on my machine and that is why i run linux on the machines i work with , i couldn't care less about the crunchers ... nothing to see there really

Greetings Zombu2,

Hear, hear! I agree 100%. I would like a way to remove tiles and/or replace them with a verbal equivalent. I cannot read pictures, but I sure as hell can read words. Pictures take up too much real estate. I do not own, and never will own, an Xbox. I want that 'option' removed too. And yes, I don't want crap on my PC that I don't use and cannot remove. I'm sure someone will figure out a way to remove unwanted, irremovable apps. :)

You might not be able to read pictures, but pictures are easier to understand universally and require little or no translation to other languages.

...and you can remove tiles and replace them with tiles of your choosing if you wish. I've done it, and I find it just as handy as pinning stuff to the taskbar or to the old Start Menu.